en go to comical extremes to avoid romantic entanglements. In an episode of the 1937 T.V. show , the seminal character ‘Spanky’ McFarland protests against Valentine’s Day by proposing to his fellow Rascals that they form a new club: the ‘He-man Woman Haters Club’. Hilarity ensues when Spanky nominates Alfalfa, a good-natured bumbling fool (and early adopter of drape-style tailoring), who is haplessly smitten with a girl named Darla. Personally, I have always preferred the tactic embraced by Hugh Grant in : Grant is on a mission to disprove poet John Donne’s famous line that “no man is an island”. He attempts this by adopting a lifestyle he calls “island living”, which consists of essentially cutting yourself off from the world and breaking down your day into units of time to alleviate potential boredom. During the Covid pandemic this was relatively easy for me, as I would structure my day around writing, exercising to the point of near cardiac arrest, and taking care of my indomitable Dachshund puppy, Bandit. Indeed, after one particularly horrific electronic dating-app encounter, I retreated to the comfort of my sofa and explained to Bandit that it would be “just you and me now, Bandit; we shall live out our lives in solitude, providing comfort, solace and witty repartee to one another”. Bandit gave her assent in the form of her signature gurgle. However, she soon broke our pact when she started dating my neighbour’s Dachshund, Ziggy. Amid an unremitting sea of romantic bleakness, Ziggy provided a moment that made me smile. So enamoured was he of Bandit that at some point he escaped the apartment in which he lived, took the lift by himself to the ground floor, and strolled two buildings over without getting hit by a car to park himself on the grass in front of my building. There, as it was recounted to me by the security guards, he howled woefully at my apartment, trying to call out for his beloved Bandida. I sometimes imagine him wearing a trenchcoat and holding up a tiny boombox playing Peter Gabriel’s , like John Cusack in …
